Trump Abuses His Tariff Power, Violates Treaty Obligations, and Breaks His Own Deal to Extort NATO Allies to Hand Over Greenland

Donald Trump is supposed to go to Congress if he wants to do any of three things: raise tariffs, engage in military conquest, or repudiate our treaty obligations to our allies. Instead, he’s doing all three by his own decree. He is unilaterally raising tariffs on Europe, throwing out a deal with them last year, to pressure them into letting him seize Greenland.

The Associated Press reports:

President Donald Trump said Saturday that he would charge a 10% import tax starting in February on goods from eight European nations because of their opposition to American control of Greenland, setting up a potentially dangerous test of U.S. partnerships in Europe.

Denmark, Norway, Sweden, France, Germany, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands and Finland would face the tariff, Trump said in a social media post while at his golf club in West Palm Beach, Florida. The rate would climb to 25% on June 1 if no deal was in place for “the Complete and Total purchase of Greenland” by the United States, he said. …

The tariff threat could mark a problematic rupture between Trump and America’s longtime NATO partners. …

There are immediate questions about how the White House could try to implement the tariffs because the EU is a single economic zone in terms of trading, according to a European diplomat who was not authorized to comment publicly and spoke on the condition of anonymity. It was unclear, too, how Trump could act under U.S. law, though he could cite emergency economic powers that are currently subject to a U.S. Supreme Court challenge.

“It is unclear” is overly cautious journalism speak for “blatantly illegal.”

This is an expression of complete contempt for Congress. Trump is pushing America into a dangerous and destructive conflict with our closest allies without making the slightest effort to gain the approval of the American people or their representatives.

The Executive Watch is a project of the Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism, and its flagship publication The UnPopulist, to track in an ongoing way the abuses of the power of the American presidency. It sorts these abuses into five categories: Personal Grift, Political Corruption, Presidential Retribution, Power Consolidation, and Policy Illegality. Click the category of interest to get an overview of all the abuses under it.

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